Muriel Humphrey: Minnesota's First Woman Senator Who Declined to Run

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Muriel Humphrey was born Muriel Faye Buck in 1912 and grew up in Huron, South Dakota, where she worked as a bookkeeper while attending Huron College and met Hubert Humphrey. After they married in 1936, she paid the bills as a typist for the Department of Government at Louisiana State University while he did graduate work there, typing the papers that kept the department running. The family later settled in Waverly, Minnesota, raising four children. In the 1960 Democratic primaries she campaigned across Wisconsin against John F. Kennedy's operation, giving speeches at a time when candidates' wives rarely spoke on policy, and after Lyndon B. Johnson chose her husband as his running mate in 1964, she became second lady.

The birth of her granddaughter Victoria with Down syndrome made her an advocate for people with intellectual disabilities at a time when doctors urged families to institutionalize such children. After Hubert Humphrey died of bladder cancer in January 1978, Governor Rudy Perpich appointed her to his Senate seat, making her Minnesota's first woman senator. She joined the Foreign Relations Committee, backed Jimmy Carter's foreign policy, pushed to extend the Equal Rights Amendment ratification deadline and sponsored the Mental Health Advocacy Act of 1978, then chose not to run in the special election after consulting Carter. She married childhood friend Max Brown in 1981, later said her politics sat further left than her husband's, and died in 1998 at 86.

• She served on the President's Committee for people with intellectual disabilities from 1966 to 1969.
• During the 1967 and 1968 campaign cycles she toured care facilities on Long Island with New York Times reporters along.
• A 1970 speech she gave on public attitudes toward Down syndrome was reprinted in a medical journal.
• She was the first spouse of a former vice president to go on to serve in Congress.
• As a private citizen she spoke out in support of women's access to abortion.